Ten years ago tomorrow the US along with its Coalition partners invaded Iraq to topple the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The question of whether or not the war was worth the colossal loss of human life continues to divide opinion.
Ten years ago tomorrow the US along with its Coalition partners invaded Iraq to topple the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
After a fairly hasty disposal of the Iraqi army and the taking of Baghdad, President George W Bush famously declared “mission accomplished” aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Since then, however, hundreds of thousands have died in Iraq, and while elections have taken place and Saddam’s Hussein and his crime family have been deposed, for ordinary Iraqis life remains a struggle – a 2011 poll by Zogby found that 42 per cent of Iraqis felt they were worse off in the fledgling democracy than they had been under Saddam.
The question of whether or not the war was worth the colossal loss of human life continues to divide opinion in the US, too.
58 per cent of Republicans say Iraqis are “better off” compared with just a quarter (24 per cent) of Democrats. Almost half (44 per cent) of all Americans either are “not sure” or say things are “the same” as before the invasion.
Source: Costs of war
For those who backed the war, justification for the invasion may be found in the fact that Iraq is now a – albeit flawed – democracy.
The idea that there was ever a straightforward alternative to overthrowing Saddam Hussein by force was always rather simplistic too, and relied upon the continued presence of a no-fly-zone in the north of the country (also a form of intervention), as well as on crippling sanctions which, according to some estimates, caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children.
However, one of the lessons of Iraq, the French writer Pascal Bruckner says in his book The Tyranny of Guilt, is that “People who hope to see local versions of the Parliament in Westminster established in Kabul, Riyadh, Algiers, and Moscow will have to be patient and learn to accept necessity.”
Quite.
The point missed by those who follow Tony Blair around demanding that he be tried for war crimes, however, is that whether one supported the war in Iraq or not one was still wrong. There was no easy answer to the question of how to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and were he seated in Baghdad today the world would still face the question of how to prize him from power before the country degenerated into bankruptcy and massacre.
Would another Syria really be an improvement on today’s Iraq?
What do you think? Ten years on, was the decision to invade Iraq the correct one?
21 Responses to “Iraq: ten years on”
Old Albion
Blair is a lying criminal with blood on his hands. LFF support him because he’s a Lefty…..natch.
If Iraq is now a democracy………….democracy is fucked.
Mark Raymond
Bring the troops home. How many more lives and how much more money need to be wasted on the British state’s imperialist misadventures here, there and everywhere? HM Forces should be used to defend the United Kingdom, not to poke HM Government’s nose in where it isn’t wanted or needed.
Duncan McFarlane
You talk, like Blair, as if sanctions could not have been lifted without war and as if this justifies the war. That’s not true. Sanctions could have been lifted at any time without war. After 1991 there was no WMD threat from Iraq and no threat of more massacres of or use of WMD on Iraqis by Saddam’s regime. During the 1991 war he still had chemical warheads he could have fitted to his scud missiles but didn’t use any of them, showing he was not willing to take the risk of what the US might do if he did use them. He had only been able to commit genocide against the Kurds in the 1980s because every major and middling power including the US, the UK, the Soviet Union, France and China, was arming, funding and supporting him against Iran – before and after Halabja. The massacre of Shia rebels and their families in the South in 1991 happened only because Bush senior called on Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam, giving them the impression Coalition forces would aid them, before ordering his troops not to do anything to stop the massacre in the South. The main reasons the US didnt want sanctions raised while Saddam was in power were that he had given oil contracts to French, Chinese and Russian companies but not the major US or UK oil firms ; and that the US would have been embarrassed by Saddam’s survival in power, even if it was only temporary.
Newsbot9
Okay, so you think democracy is fucked. Thanks for supporting LB’s view.
Newsbot9
And that’s the UKIP party line, if you like it or not.
Leave the people who the British screwed over with imperialism to rot, don’t raise a hand against dictators….